Article: `A Fiercely Moral Fiend': Straub's Newest Chiller

The Hellfire Club By Peter Straub. Random House. $25.95. This new novel by Peter Straub, the literate definer of nightmares in Ghost Story, is grounds to hope for a snowbound weekend.

Abandoning the supernatural, Straub jumps genres in The Hellfire Club, which combines the cozy realm of the intellectual-puzzle mystery with a powerful vein of psycho-thriller suspense. The corpse count is substantial, and though most of the gore occurs far offstage, there's still enough graphic violence to push a sofa lizard's pulse to aerobic levels. As in Straub's previous big books, this is a gargantuan engine with multiple, meshing plots in which the sins of the past power the active evil of the ...

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